Last night I pointed out how pro-Obama columnists are telling him that the Massachusetts Event meant essentially nothing, that the people who oppose the health care bill are wrong, and that he should just continue as before. And this morning we learn that the president is doing exactly that. “White House to take new shot at health care reform despite Massachusetts setback,” reports the New York Daily News. The L-dotters react.

And here’s more on the Democrats’ machinations, from Daniel Foster at the Corner. The complexity—the forced and unnatural quality—of the steps the Democrats are now planning in order to get a bill through in the face of public opinion and thus subject America to a bureaucratic tyranny, is surreal. VFR’s recent emphasis on gnosticism as a way of understanding the American left could not be more appropriate. Here again is the passage from Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics which I quoted one month ago, in an entry entitled, “We are seeing liberalism morph into totalitarianism”:

A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.

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Jeremy G. writes:

Its not just Obama and his crazy advisors who are pushing forward in their gnostic war against America. Look at this Gallup poll.

Democratic voters are still strongly in support of Obama while the rest of the country has retained its sanity. So what is this poor fool of a president to do? If he accepts defeat on health care, his signature issue that he has worked on for almost an entire year and that progressives have been dreaming about for 100 years, he must take on his gnostic base, who are his only remaining supporters. How does he explain to emotional leftists (in a language that doesn’t further polarize the country) that it’s time to move on?

LA replies:

Interesting way of seeing it. Let’s say (purely hypothetically) that Obama was personally ready to give up the fight, but couldn’t because it would alienate his base. Therefore he would have to keep fighting as long as he possibly could, even if he knew that he couldn’t win. If he tries as hard as he can and still fails, his base will at least appreciate his loyalty to the cause and not desert him.